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Alert! New high quality forgeries have been seen of the 1943 Irish Half CrownView Thread

The question of how many Currency Commission Consolidated (Ploughman) banknotes are likely to have survived, and the proportion of surviving notes for each bank has long been a topic of speculation and discussion. The Ploughman Scan Survey aims to address these questions

A survey is likely the best way to determine the answer. This depends on the collecting community out there recording every note they see, and posting the information. Notes need to be recorded as images to avoid errors in transcription.

I invite members and visitors to post a pic (or link to pictures) of any Ploughman notes they have come across, take a snap with your phone, camera, scanner, whatever and post it here, or email the pic to lists AT irishpapermoney DOT com for inclusion.

The Ploughman Scan Survey (PSS) is a continuing survey which seeks to record all the surviving Currency Commission Consolidated (Ploughman) bank notes.

The PSS Changelog and Survey Report Threads are in the Ploughman Survey Forum. Also, the additions listed in this thread are listen there in greater detail. Users need to be Registered to view and post in this forum.

These results will comprise exact figures for all the Ploughman notes recorded of each denomination for every bank in the first wave of the survey, and a detailed analysis of these Data. It will give an insight into the possible numbers of notes remaining, and an accurate reflection of the relative rarity of notes of each Type.

April and May were both good months for recording Ploughman notes.Two sizable collections and several smaller groups were added, with most of the notes being new to the census.

June promises to be good too, with 30+ notes being offered in auction in Dublin, almost all of which are new to the census.

As ever, there continues to be a steady trickle of single notes being sent in, particularly £1 notes.The percentage of £1 notes recorded continues to rise, and is now over 3% of the total outstanding number of notes.

The survey depends on the banknote collecting community, so keep sending scans of your notes

Added 3 £1 notes today, plus another £1 and £5 which had been recorded long ago but without images. A nice end to August for the PSS. August has been quite a good month for the Ploughman census, with £70 face value added, mostly in £1 notes.A detailed breakdown by bank is in the Ploughman Banknote Survey (PSS) section.

EDIT: 18.11.15Added 28 notes previously not recorded, including some images, old data recorded from Whytes auctions in 1995—2001. Many other notes in the catalogues have turned up subsequently, but these 28 had not been added to PSS previously. A nice find!

Total: £1 x 23, £5 x 1, £10 x 3. Fv = £58

EDIT 22.11.156 £1 notes spotted in an on-line auction. All new to PSS. Grades mostly VG.

Last month I received a usb with about 83 Ploughman scans on it. This feedback was a direct result of the Coin News article I wrote on the PSS, and it is much appreciated. A detailed breakdown of the notes follow.

Generally, it will be seen that the number of £1 notes recorded relative to the other denominations is increasing.This is to be expected in the long term, as smaller collections are added into the database.

Once again, a big thank you to all the collectors and dealers who are supporting the survey project.We're nearly at the point where some more results are worth publishing, most likely as part of another article in Coin News.

£32 face value added to the census at the February Dublin Coin Fair this year, including an Ulster Bank £10 note in good Fine grade. Additionally, images were added for a further 19 notes previously recorded without images being available at the time, one of these going way back over 20 years!

I've been looking at the grades of the notes lately.I have about 2000 notes to grade there.

One of the interesting things about the Ploughman Scan Survey data images subset is the relatively few £1 notes recorded with graffiti on them—I remember lots of Ploughmans with writing on them in the old days.

There are also some other trends emerging: people are still bleaching notes, with less skill (if you can call it that) than they did 30 years ago! Some really dopey cretins out there. I've seen a good spread of notes that have been bleached since I first recorded them—ebay is becoming a wasteland of these.